He went to war because every intelligence agency in the West (not just the US, but France, Germany, the UK, even Israel, et al) believed Saddam's lie about having WMDs. Saddam was trying to maintain a cold war with Iran, and wanted them to believe he had an active WMD program as a deterrent. He was a little too convincing for his own good. Whether pre-emptive action against Iraq was the right strategy or not, it seems pretty clear it was a good-faith decision.

If you design an engine to take advantage of the high octane number of a high-ethanol blend (i.e., E20+), with a high compression ratio, etc., there is a lot to be gained. A higher compression ratio inherently makes the thermodynamic cycle more efficient, and the high octane number avoids the losses due to retarded combustion phasing that are necessary to avoid knock with gasoline.

Running certification tests on a high-ethanol blend doesn't, in and of itself, bring about those design changes. What it does is give the manufacturers a motivation to put all the extra work into really calibrating their engines twice for both a high-ethanol and a low-ethanol fuel, by actually giving them credit on CAFE, etc. The approach would also require that high-ethanol blends be available and actually be purchased by the consumers... there are more than a few barriers there, but research shows that it is possible to overcome the energy density penalty if the engine is optimized for E85.

Possibly ... I suspect durability could be a challenge. They are going as far as active louvers in the grill, etc. these days on some vehicles (e.g. some Ford Focus models) though, and new models have much tighter clearances around body openings/joints than was common in the past.

Well, "drastically" might be a bit of an overstatement ... on a volumetric basis, ethanol has 36% less energy than gasoline, so E10 (10% ethanol by volume) has 3.6% less energy. In real-world terms, this means getting 29 mpg instead of 30. It's measurable, but not, perhaps, "drastic."

You are correct on certifications being performed using E0 fuel, while E10 is the norm almost everywhere in the US. There is some desire to allow certifications using higher ethanol blends for flex-fuel vehicles, which would let automakers take advantage of some of the other fuel properties of ethanol (e.g., very high octane rating) to make engines more efficient (and have those efficiency gains actually count for CAFE purposes) and thus offset the energy density penalty.

Fashion ... and things like the engine not overheating, the hood and doors being able to open, and other such trivialities...

No, and they didn't prosecute him for conspiracy, etc. They said that one factor in their deciding to prosecute him for the laws he did break because of his clear, stated intention to break additional laws. The prosecution was for things he actually did that were illegal. The DOJ's decision to prosecute rather than ignore those infractions was based in part on his stated intentions of future actions.

Exactly. In particular, what they said was that due to this manifesto of his, they believed that his intent was to make the documents he was downloading publicly available - that is, violate the copyright by redistributing them. In other words, he publicly said, "We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks," and was in the process of doing said downloading. They had reasonable cause to believe that his intention was to upload these papers to file sharing networks, in violation of the law, as stated in his manifesto. While his intention to break the law might have been "politically motivated," the prosecution was based on his stated intention to break additional laws, not on silencing his political beliefs.

In the US, divorce rates climbed dramatically through the 60s and 70s (with the advent of no-fault divorce laws), and have slowly declined since then from the peak they hit around 1980. This graph is normalized by the number of married people, but the same trend holds when normalized by total population.

As one of the others, I'm with you. The website works fine in IE, and the videos play. I'm not worried about whether a separate "app" exists to duplicate that functionality. It is interesting that Microsoft is calling Google out for being evil (they've also intentionally broken Gmail access by Windows Phone on multiple occasions), but from a user perspective, the YouTube thing isn't really a big deal.

Have you ever been target shooting? Having to reload a handgun after every three rounds would be a significant inconvenience, for no actual benefit. That's not to say that some sort of limit on high-capacity magazines may not have some effect, but 3 is probably going a bit far.

Also, shotguns are only limited to three rounds when used for hunting or trap/skeet competitions. You can easily find models that hold 7 rounds, e.g.

The app has the ability to sign up for a free account; Microsoft either never had or offered to remove (I've seen different stories on different sites) the ability to elect to subscribe to additional storage from the app.

The Skydrive app that Apple refused to approve doesn't allow in-app sign-up/purchase of subscriptions. It's a free app that works with a service that has an optional subscription component (you can pay for additional storage) ... but you can only buy the subscription through the website, not the iOS app. Apple wanted a 30% cut on those subscription revenues anyway and Microsoft told them to go take a hike. The same concern applies to Microsoft's plan to release Office apps for iOS: Apple wants a cut of Office365 subscriptions just because the apps will work with that service, even though users aren't subscribing or making a purchase through the app.

OP has a point though. While you don't explicitly try to extend your control beyond your jurisdiction, when it comes to privacy protection on major websites, we all benefit from Europe's oversight, even here in the US, because it's much easier for sites to just make their whole system work in a way that satisfies European regulations rather than fragmenting into different sub-sites for each jurisdiction.

But Windows Phone does have apps. It has lots of apps, actually. Not the sheer numbers of iOS and Android just yet, though Microsoft's outreach efforts to developers, or their view of the strength of the platform, is such that the selection has been growing at the same rate Apple's did after their launch and faster than Androids. But I can't remember the last time I went to look for something in the Marketplace and came up empty.

You could add to that the issue of integrated features being good enough to make apps redundant (e.g. Bing Local Scout > Yelp!; Bing Music Search > Shazaam!; Bing Vison > tag reader apps; etc.), but all those apps are available regardless, along with all the other big names, and several have better UI experiences on WP than on iOS.

Really, the idea that there aren't apps available is FUD these days. That hasn't been a serious roadblock for a year or more, and the situation is improving all the time. And the presumptive ease of porting apps between WP8 and Win8 can only help in the future.

What Windows Phone really still lacks is consumer awareness, retail sales support, and marketing.

Yeah, he's just gonna take it lying down.